It was a phone call with my mother that brought me out to the seaside the next evening as the sun was beginning to go down. After talking to her I always felt stifled, more so than ever now, since getting a glimpse of what it was like to breathe again while being away from her.

“You’re tending to the stitches?”

“Yes, Mom.” 

“Make sure to get some cocoa butter. You know you’re prone to scars.” 

“It’s not even healed yet.” 

“It’s good to use it early. It’ll help. How are you sleeping?”

“Fine.”

“You’re not oversleeping anymore, are you? It’s not good for you.”

“I know.”

“You really need to start trying, Vi. How’s Nan?”

“She’s fine.”

“You should talk to her about Grampie if you get the chance.”

“I don’t have anything to say to her about Grampie.” 

“You know what I mean. This has gone on too long. Just try and make her see some reason. You understand.”

“I have to go, Mom.”

“I’ll see you on your birthday.”

“Sure.”

My throat was tight, painful, and choking, a knot in my esophagus that throbbed with every pound of my pulse. I escaped the house to try and breathe again, and my wandering feet followed the pull of my aching heart, like a bird drawn to migrate south without a sense of why.

The stormy waves frothed foamy white far out in the violent waters, but calmed as they approached the coast, reaching out to caress the sand like a lover’s fingers across a cheek, then pulling away. A forever unsatisfying romance between the water and the land. I could taste their romance in the air, misty and moist, salt on my tongue and tangled through my hair.

I sat there for hours, letting the sound of their love calm me. The clenching in my throat released as the sun dipped under the gray clouds and touched the horizon. A chill set in when the rising water threatened to kiss my feet; I shivered and wrapped my sweater tighter around me, wondering what it would be like to keep sitting there and let the ocean take me away with it as the tide retreated again in a few hours. 

I stood, watching the waves approach my toes, teasing close then drawing away, a curled finger beckoning me to follow. I kicked off my runners and discarded my socks, then took a step forward, meeting the water with its next approach.

It was freezing, biting at my bare skin like knives. The pain only lasted a moment though, then my feet were numb and the caress became bearable. Is this how it felt to disappear into the water’s embrace? Briefly painful, but with a blissfully numb conclusion? It seemed nice. Tolerable. I gripped my bandaged wrist, squeezing and making the wound ache. Slitting my wrist had hurt more than I anticipated. I knew I didn’t want to do it that way again.

I stood there until the ocean’s frigid advance wrapped around my ankles and soaked the hem of my jeans. I stood there until I couldn’t feel my toes any longer, digging them into the sand to test them. I stood there until the soft lullaby of the sweeping waves was interrupted by the assaulting noise of someone clearing their throat. 

I twisted towards the sound, stricken with panic, pin pricks over my hot skin, which dissipated into annoyance and embarrassment as I found a familiar shadow behind me. 

“What the hell are you doing here?” Profanity unintentionally escaped with my surprise. I thought to apologize, but my offense from his intrusion kept me silently scowling instead.

He let his hood down and swept his black fringe back out of his vision. The low light casted shade on the contours of his face, making the lines of his cheeks and jaw skeletal. His gray eyes flicked down to my bare feet, submerged in the water. 

“I could ask the same thing.”

I shot a glare at him as cold as the water I stood in, then turned away, determined to ignore both him and his question. It wasn’t any of his business anyway. 

When I didn’t answer I heard him shift and I peered from my peripherals as he bent over to roll up his jeans and untie his boots. In no time he was barefooted also, and I stared at him unabashed as he stepped towards me.

His expression stayed smooth and emotionless, even as he stepped ankle-deep into the freezing waves with me. I was far less discreet with my reaction, and when I continued to gawk, he answered with a curious look. 

“What are you doing?” I asked sharply, when I was finally able to shake off my confusion and find annoyance again. 

He shrugged, admiring the brightly painted horizon. “You tell me.”

“I came here to be alone.” I deflected the question again. I didn’t like the idea of admitting to some weird, skeleton kid that I was indulging in fantasies of killing myself. “Did my grandmother send you?”

He shrugged again.

“Are you stalking me?”

This garnered a response from him, but it was nothing more than a grin in my direction. Then, he put his hands in the pockets of his jacket, letting his shoulders fall into a relaxed posture. 

“Fine. I was just leaving anyway,” I said, stomping my wet, frozen feet out of the water and back to my shoes. I dusted off my soles messily and threw on a sock, not caring about the wetness making sand stick between my toes. I wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible.

Before I had my second sock on, he was following my lead and returning to his footwear. I glared at him again, but he just smiled sweetly back at me.

I knew he meant to come with me, so I fled to the woods, thinking to lose him on a path he was unfamiliar with. Unfortunately for me, I misjudged the amount of sun left, and as I reached the dense tree line, barely any light made it through to me. I tripped over roots and stones, unable to properly see where I stepped. It slowed my pace significantly, and he caught up to me in a matter of moments.

While trying to keep my pace to lose him, I stumbled, going over on my ankle and collapsing. It wasn’t a necessarily rough fall, but it was enough to make me admit defeat to the battle I was fighting. I sighed and sat on the ground until he covered the few yards between us, carefully avoiding the obstacles I had so much trouble with. 

He reached into his jacket to retrieve a small pen light as he approached, shining it on the ground near me to help give us both some vision. He didn’t say anything in reply to my sheepish embarrassment. Instead, he simply held out a hand and helped me get back on my feet. 

He directed the light to the ground in front of me so I could see where I was stepping and we continued at a slower pace. I refused to speak to him, and he seemed fine with not talking, so the walk was filled with a silence that was only awkward from one side. It gave me time for my previous frustrations to dissolve though, so when we finally exited the woods, I felt slightly more humbled.

When we approached the entrance to my grandparents’ estate, I lingered with my hand on the doorknob. “Thanks for helping me back.”

He smiled again, nodding once. “Bring a flashlight next time.” 

His inflection never changed, but I could tell he was teasing me. Despite myself, a grin of my own twisted at the corner of my lips as I entered the house, closing the door behind me.

My grandmother was hanging up the phone as I entered the kitchen, stress causing her frown lines to harden. “There you are. I just about had the police coming out to look for you. Your mother told me you spoke today. I was concerned.”

I lowered my gaze in shame. It was the first time in a long time that I hadn’t meant to make someone worry. “Sorry, Nan. I was down at the water.” 

“I don’t want to demand you tell me where you are at all times, you’re almost a grown woman. But you need to at least tell me where you’re going, when you’ll be back. For the sake of my already high blood pressure.” 

My grandmother seemed genuinely concerned by my disappearance, and it made me feel even more disappointed with myself. My mother always bickered at me when I ran off alone, maybe because she assumed I was going off to hurt myself, but my grandmother didn’t react as such. It was as if she was simply aware that any number of things could happen to me, and she was concerned for all of them, not just worried about what I’d do to myself.

“It won’t happen again. I promise,” I said, bringing my eyes up from the floor to make the oath to her.

She sighed, not in frustration but in relief, and bridged the space between us to give me a gentle hug. The tenseness in my muscles, put there by my mother and lingered in my joints all day, released as she held me. It had been so long, I almost forgot that I had a body, that I wasn’t just a ghost. 

I sighed also. 

As she withdrew, I tried to loosen the knot in my throat with some lightheartedness. “And besides, even if it does happen again, you can always send that kid after me again. He did a pretty good job of finding me.” 

She screwed up her nose. “The boy? I never told him I was looking for you.” Sensing my confusion, my grandmother smirked. “Maybe he followed you. Maybe you have an admirer.”

I grimaced. “Stalker. That’s what we call it nowadays, Nan.” 

She scoffed playfully at me.

***

With my feet still frozen, I wore three pairs of socks to bed that night and sat up with a lamp and my journal, a cocoon of blankets wrapped around me. I spent a while reading over the things I already had written. I added a few notes to my list: Go to the movie theater. Watch the stars. Stay up all night to see the sun rise. 

I looked at my drawings from the days before, what I’d jotted down, my list of ways to kill myself. Go swimming in December. Let the cold take you. I scratched out December and substituted January, then marked a star next to the sentence, for future reference.

I fell asleep drawing the way the fiery sunset had chiseled into his features.